New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Lt. Gen. Russel Honore are both black. That may be the only thing they have in common. Nagin is grossly incompetent and Honore is respected as a man of considerable skills and leadership. The latter has earned his way in life as a military officer. Nagin appears to have used his skin color to manipulate the private sector into awarding him millions of dollars in compensation. He was once a vice president with Cox Communications. Anyone involved in the communications industry can tell you that affirmative action “inclusionary policies” significantly influence the hiring and promotion process. Today Nagin is perhaps the worst mayor of a major American city. It is very fair to argue that affirmative action so-called remedies are responsible for much of the death and destruction in New Orleans. How much longer will this nonsense continue?

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IMO Nagin's performance leading up to, and since, Katrina speaks for itself and doesn't say much that lends itself to positive interpretation.

This is somewhat OT, but the whole episode has prompted me to ponder what might happen under similar circumstances for cities similar to New Orleans. Granted New Orleans is somewhat a special case - storm induced flooding was a reality there and disaster clearly inevitable.

Anyway, I picked a couple "notorious" cities: Camden and Newark - both in NJ.

I admit that I did not perform an exhaustive search but I see no evidence on website for city services that Camden has any overall emergency management service. That may be fine, I suppose, since Camden is not in the crosshairs of any predictable and recurring natural disaster generators such as hurricanes, tornados, earth quakes.

They seem to have a pretty pedestrian notion of emergency management - deal with fires and grants.

Newark at least has some sort of Emergency Management Agency although the website is largely "content free" and I can't detect any disaster evacuation plans.

If large scale disaster were to strike either of those cities I suspect they would be hopelessly unprepared. Preparedness thinking seems to be limited to "how do we deal with a high rise fire?"

BTW, I also looked at My Little Town and find no evidence of any Emergency Management services. Time to attend a meeting and ask a question or two.

Some cities can afford to be somewhat nonchalant toward emergency evacuations. They may go the next five hundred years without a major crisis. This, however, is not the case for New Orleans. One know that it is likely to suffer a destructive storm three or four times a century. Voters in New Orleans must make certain that they elect competent public officials. Unfortunately, the emphasis has instead been placed on skin color. A second rate mediocrity like Ray Nagin took advantage of this racist mindset. There are far too many black Americans (I prefer not to use the term, Afro-American) who will not vote for a white mayoral candidate. Some of them have now lost their lives due to this prejudicial attitude.

The main role of the mayor of an American city is to dispense patronage. I imagine Nagin is perfectly qualified to do that.

Seriously, I doubt very much that Nagin is the worst mayor in America. He just happened to get caught in the spotlight in this case. But in a country which can elect Marion Barry as mayor of its capital city, I think Nagin is probably pretty average.

What that says about the people in Americas cities is a whole different story of course.

I can't believe Bush is catching hell for not evacuating the city in two days after the hurricane hit when this guy had two days waiting for it to come and did not even bother to get the buses to high ground.

I think Nagin is a product of a corrupt and self serving system that has ill served the people of New Orleans.

I also think Honore should run for Mayor after he leaves the military. He would probably be the city's first honest public servant in living memory.